Digital Tampa Bay

Don’t Look Now But Yahoo Is Making A Comeback

What’s this?  Yahoo, the company analysts had all but written off is rising from the mat once again.  According to JP Morgan’s Imran Khan Yahoo just increased it’s domestic search market share for the sixth month in a row.  Some of the details:

• According to the data, total US core search volume increased 28.6% Y/Y in January, slightly below 30.6% Y/Y growth in December. However, the January growth level was ahead of 4Q’s 23.7% Y/Y growth.

• Google domestic core search market share was 63.0% in January, down from 63.5% in December. Google domestic core search volume growth of 38.4% Y/Y in January was slightly below December’s 42.8% growth but ahead of 4Q’s 34.7% growth.

• Yahoo! domestic core search market share increased to 21.0% in January from 20.5% in December. January domestic core search volume growth of 21.6% Y/Y was an increase from 17.2% in December and 12.0% Y/Y growth in 4Q.

• MSN January domestic core search market share grew to 8.5% from 8.3% in December. MSN domestic core search volume was up 11.3% Y/Y in January, roughly in line with 11.1% growth in December and ahead of 5.1% growth in 4Q.

• AOL January domestic core search market share increased to 3.9% from 3.8% in December. AOL domestic core search volume was up 1.1% Y/Y in January, trailing December’s 2.6% Y/Y growth but ahead of 4Q’s 0.3% Y/Y growth.

• Ask Network domestic core search market share fell slightly to 3.7% in January from 3.9% in December. Ask Network domestic core search volume was up 4.6% Y/Y, vs. 9.6% growth in December and 3.7% growth in 4Q.

The Big Old Illustrator Symbol Download Post

Here are a number of free Adobe Illustrator symbols I have recently run across.  Download the files and then extract them to your Program Files->Adobe->Adobe Illustrator CS4 (or CS3)->Presets->en_US-> Symbols folder.

Blue Swirls and Stars – 30 Illustrator Symbols:

Adobe Illustrator Symbols – Swirls and Stars (120)

Gold Swirls and Stars – 40 Illustrator Symbols:

Adobe Illustrator Symbols – Gold Swirls and Stars (122)

More Gold Swirls – 20 Illustrator Symbols:

Adobe Illustrator Symbols – More gold swirls (103)

Circle Patterns – 30 Illustrator Symbols:

Adobe Ilustrator Symbols – Circular Patterns (142)

3D Backgrounds – 15 Illustrator Symbols:

Adobe Illustrator Symbols – 3D Backgrounds (130)

Abstract Patterns – 25 Illustrator Symbols:

Adobe Illustrator Symbols – Abstract Patterns (141)

Halftone Symbols – 12 Illustrator Symbols

Adobe Illustrator Symbols – Halftone Symbols (145)

Web Design Tutorial: Photoshop Image Reflection

Ever wonder how web designers create that cool image reflection effect? You might think it takes a lot of training and practice but it is much simpler. Now you can learn how to do it yourself in Photoshop with just a few simple steps. Here are the steps:

Step 1: Choose the image that you want reflected. It may be your logo or just some cool image that you think would be perfect for the job. For our purposes we will be using the logo from My Shop Tampa Bay:

Step 2:  Open the image in Photoshop.  Your Layers pallete should look something like this (other than your image being different):

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Super Bowl Commercials

Here is my pick for the funniest super bowl commercial of this years crop:

Conan Obrien Bud Light Commercial

Web Design Tutorial: Creating a Favicon for your Website

A favicon is a short way of saying “favorite icon”.  It is the tiny icon that you see in your browser’s url bar.  It is created by web designers and then installed on a website or individual webpage for added marketing effect.  A favicon is 16pixels by 16 pixels in size.  You can take the following steps to create your own favicon:

• Using photoshop or some other image editor create an image that is 64pixels by 64pixels.  It is important to start off with the image this size so you can make adjustments and test out your image before you reduce it further.  Try to find an image that is distinctive and will stand out when shrunk down.  It can be a letter, a logo, an icon.  Make sure that it represents your brand and will inspire brand recognition when viewed by visitors to your website.

• Once you are comfortable with the quality of your image reduce the size of the image to 16pixels by 16pixels.

• Save the image as favicon.ico.

• Upload the image to the root directory of your website.

• Alternatively to uploading favicon.ico to your root directory you can add a link element to the <head> section of the page on which you would like to display the icon.  In this way you can use images in different formats such as PNG and GIF files.

• Clear your cache and restart your browser.

Voila, you have a favicon for your website.  Now you have added a small detail that will add to the visual appearance of your website and help your customers recognize your brand.

Send Email Text Messages

Did you know you can send a text message to someone just by emailing them?  Cellular carriers use what are called “SMS gateways” which deliver emails sent to their customers as SMS text messages.  There’s really nothing to it; all you need is the correct email address for the phone you are trying to send an email to and you can determine this by finding out what cellular carrier the person uses.  Here is a list of the formats used for text messages by the major cell phone carriers:

Alltel
[10-digit phone number]@message.alltel.com
Example: 5551234567@message.alltel.com

AT&T (formerly Cingular)
[10-digit phone number]@txt.att.net
Example: 5551234567@txt.att.net

Boost Mobile
[10-digit phone number]@myboostmobile.com
Example: 5551234567@myboostmobile.com

Nextel
[10-digit telephone number]@messaging.nextel.com
Example: 5551234567@messaging.nextel.com

Sprint Nextel
[10-digit phone number]@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Example: 5551234567@messaging.sprintpcs.com

T-Mobile
[10-digit phone number]@tmomail.net
Example: 5551234567@tmomail.net

Verizon
[10-digit phone number]@vtext.com
Example: 5551234567@vtext.com

Virgin Mobile USA
[10-digit phone number]@vmobl.com
Example: 5551234567@vmobl.com

Not only is this practice yet another way to quickly and effectively communicate with friends and associates but it also has practical meaning for web designers and webmasters.  For example, by creating a web form on a website you can allow users to contact you via email but by also sending an email to your cell phone you can also easily setup the form to notify you via SMS text message when a visitor to your site has contacted you.  For web businesses that require instant information delivery the possibilities for this technique are endless.

Ten Fundamentals of Functional Web Design

10. If using a splash page make sure it is stylish and easy to bypass – A splash page is an introduction page, generally with some type of slideshow or movie with a link for users to enter your site.  Particularly if you are designing a site where users will be returning to the site frequently you must be certain that this introduction is not time consuming and otherwise annoying so as to detract from your overall website design.

9. Make it easy for the user to contact the site’s owner or representative – There is nothing more annoying than having to wade through page after page in order to contact a webmaster/site owner.  It is certainly understandable to not want to disclose your email address for spammers to get a hold of, however, designing a properly coded web form will provide site visitors with a method of contact that protects your personal information.

8. When choosing a domain name, shorter urls are better – Although the prevalence of bookmarking has lessened the need for shorter urls it still has a negative effect on the usability of your website if visitors have to manually enter a lengthy web address.  There is no conclusive proof that url length has any bearing on search engine optimization.

7. Create meta-tags and place them in the appropriate area – Meta-tags are html elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page.  Although they no longer factor into search engine rankings they do effect how information about your site is displayed in the search engines.  The “title” tag gives a concise description of the information displayed on the page.  The “keywords” tag provides a list of keywords describing your content.  The “description” tag provides a more detailed explanation of the content contained on your page.  The meta-tags for Tampa Bay Website Design are as follows:

<title>Tampa Bay Website Design – Web Design Services Serving  Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Dunedin, Bradenton, Palm Harbor, and the State of Florida </title>

<meta name=”keywords” content=”tampa bay web design, tampa bay website design, tampa web design, st. petersburg web design, clearwater web design, palm harbor web design, dunedin web design, bradenton web design” />

<meta name=”description” content=”Tampa Bay Website Design is a full service web marketing firm located in St. Petersburg, Florida that provides a wide range of web design services to the Tampa Bay, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Palm Harbor, Dunedin, Bradenton areas.” />

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Watch Out For Phoney Facebook Emails

There is a new virus being perpetrated through the Facebook user list called the “Koobface” virus.  According to the Kaspersky Lab “the worms transform victim machines into zombie computers to form botnets.”  Here’s how the virus is spread.  You receive an email from one of your Facebook friends that contains a video that you are supposed to watch.  When you go to open the video you are prompted to update your Flash player in order to view the video.  The download, flash_player.exe is actually the virus.  According to the McAfee Security Blog the virus prompts a downloaded service to load on startup and “listens on TCP port 9090 and proxies all HTTP traffic, in particular looking for traffic to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live.com for the purpose of hijacking search results.  Search terms are directed to find-www.net.  This enables ad hijacking and click fraud.”

According to Facebook, users who have been infected with the “Koobface” virus are instructed to use an antivirus program to remove the virus and then change their password.  This attack comes after Facebook won an $873 million lawsuit against spammers a couple of weeks ago.

New Blackberry Storm Has Stormy Debut

Canadian based Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry is quickly finding out that the transition from appealing to strictly business customers to focusing on all consumers is a difficult one.  The new Blackberry Storm was released almost two weeks ago and already consumers are in an uproar about the phone’s “buginess” and “user unfriendliness”.

Some consumers and industry analysts believe that the Storm was rushed to market before the holiday season before the bugs were worked out to compete with the Apple iPhone’s assault on their business market share.  The biggest complaints revolve around the Storm’s touch screen keyboards (there are three in all).  According to some users the keys are too small and it is difficult to type with any speed.  Other complaints are slow performance by the phone’s accelerometer or the motion sensor that shifts the screen, a shutter delay with the camera, media player crashes and “general buginess with the screen and menu”.

Positive features of the Blackberry Storm are that it has a video camera, the ability to text or email video and voice activated dialing.  None of these features are available in the iPhone.  Word of caution to RIM: Don’t forget what got you there.  The keyboard on the Blackberry is one of the best if not the best feature of the phone.  Stop jerking with the Blackberry!  Let Apple have their touchscreens and you just stick with what works.  That is all.